Cape Jasmine (Gardenia jasminoides)
A doctor lived with his large family in an ample house, built in the 1940’s. On one occasion, he received a seedling of a flower called Cape Jasmine, as a sign of gratitude for having saved the life of a patient. From then on, he took as a habit making seedlings of this plant, which now grew in his garden, and giving them as gifts to his friends and family. Not only that, but after the birth of each child he would bury their umbilical cords under this tree. And to this day, all his children and most of his extended family cultivate the habit of keeping a Cape Jasmine tree in their homes.
(Nydia Negromonte, on her work Cape Jasmime)
July of 2011
We arrived late morning at 280 Padre Belchior Street, in the heart of Belo Horizonte. Thereza Portes awaited us with coffee brewed in the kitchen of the house where she runs the Undió Institute. With her sweet smile, she briefly told us about the project she develops as educator and artist, focusing on the boys and girls that live in the city center. The conversation did not last longer than the coffee, but she promised to continue after we visited the house next door, which hosted Nydia’s work, an art intervention named Cape Jasmine.
We went down a small staircase and crossed a courtyard shared by the two houses. Thereza opened the door, warning us that there would be no electricity. In the first room, our eyes overcame the dimness to discover some objects leaning against each other or against the walls. Thereza advised that we would walk the same path Nydia did when she first came to know the place.
– She would not ask questions. She would look at everything silently, very concentrated, you know? But I would speak for myself, as there is a lot of history in this house, involving many things in the past, in the present… Some of the heirs want to sell the house. If that happens, the house will be demolished, like the others on this street. Nydia’s work made people look at the house anew. Even the most resistant ones in the family were touched.
We moved on to a room that was lighter than the first one and climbed up the staircase leading to the second floor. There, upstairs, the rooms were illuminated and empty except for one or another object absorbed by Nydia’s work.
– When Nydia talked to me about the work, it gave me goose bumps. It had been over twenty years since anyone used this house! To go back and leaf through the albums and look at the photos again was an experience that moved us all. But Nydia did not ask anything, did not want any information.
Nydia intervened:
– I work only with the image and the place, you know? I prefer not to know anything of the history of the house and the people. I stay in the present. My work is to juxtapose matter, image and place, allowing senses to be produced from the work installed in the space.
– And you do not have any curiosity about what happened here? – I asked.
– It is a delicate thing, to create a work in such a dense context. You have to restrict yourself to what is in front of you. The archeology relies on the passage of time and on the variations in the humidity inside the house, after the work has been completed. I perform a sequence of operations: I select the photographs, enlarge them to an A4 format, and glue them onto the walls. Then, next to them, I place humid clay plaques cut in the same format. If there is any object left in the house, I may come to include them. The same for notes and family documents. I select them, enlarge, glue the copies and apply the clay.
I ask about the archeology over which she spoke earlier.
– It was something I discovered while creating the work – she told us excitedly. – The water within the clay evaporates more or less rapidly, depending on whether the piece is wetter or drier, if the sun comes in or the air flows. This plaque over here, for example, is practically intact; that one is already starting to lift the edges; the one that is in the other room fell intact, taking a layer of the wall with it.
We come up closer. The complete fall of the plaque had produced another document, according to Nydia, brutally transforming the diptych that the clay and the photograph composed.
– Sometimes, the excavation reaches and exposes the plaster – Nydia remaked.
At the beginning of the visit, I was surprised at Nydia’s determination not to take the initiative to investigate the tales of the house. Why resist the past, when the work is about the passage of time?
After the visit, however, I was convinced I would not have understood Cape Jasmine had I not lived the experience of being in the space that had been parsimoniously punctuated by Nydia’s interventions. Listening to her talk with Thereza, both of them surprised at a piece of plaster that had fallen, or at the revelation of a layer of paint that was not visible three months before or, yet, at the fact that the wind had blown a photograph to the floor, I understood that the emotion evoked by the work is due less to the events and characters that the photos bring back to their place and more to the experience of a time that the work inaugurates and produces in that emptiness.
*
On the plane back to Porto Alegre, I recollected Thereza Portes´s words on the opening of Cape Jasmime. I pictured people coming into the room filled with dusty objects and going up the stairs that take to the second floor, stopping for a moment on the way to read a note written in 1945 in child handwriting:
News from home
Uncle Murilo is in Rio.
Carmo is studying.
Feli is at school.
Aunt Alice is ironing.
I am writing the newspaper
Geraldo hasn´t arrived.
______________________
News from the sea
A ship sank back [sic] the coast of Africa
______________________
News from the earth
Mom has arrived from Pará de Minas.
______________________
News of the week
What people really want is Brigadier.
Family members who had not spoken to each other for long, with tearful eyes. Strangers enjoyed their first visit to the house as if they were in a museum. But everyone, at a moment, would shiver with a thrill going down from their arms and out their fingers.
Children had fun running through the large rooms, some after the others, going in a door, and out of another.
(Children love emptiness).
When everyone went away, the door closed and dimness comfortably filled the house for another twenty years, who knows.
A new chapter in the history of the house had just begun.
Cape Jasmine.
*
*
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Other Voices
1.
In the forgotten house, Nydia strolls.
She asks nothing, says nothing, just observes.
Finally, she asks for photos, recordings of other times. Would they exist?
– Boxes with letters, notes, and old portraits are kept among the belongings of an old lady – I reply.
This was the material the artist needed to create her work. She selects the photos with her inquiring eyes. They are recordings of a time gone by. The dust is removed from the walls with damp cloths and there the photos are pasted, now enlarged and very much alive. Next to each photo, a block of wet clay is placed, beaten and fixed onto the old walls. And the empty environments begin to change. The bedrooms, the living and other rooms, the stairway: everything seems to have a new meaning; the history of the family that lived here is marked. The photos show happy people. Other times.
People walking by the street come visit the exhibit. They look, observe, comment:
– How is it possible that houses on this street had gardens? It is incredible!
– How come children played on the sidewalks?
– Is it possible that the ladies sat out on the sidewalk in the evening, retelling the daily news?
– Is it possible that…
(Thereza Portes´s words on the experience of hosting Cape Jasmine in the house where she and her family had lived. Belo Horizonte, 2010)
*
2.
Walter Benjamin believed that the abandonment of a place had the power of revealing its true personality. It is in the interval between one human occupation and another, when the functionality of the architecture is totally forgotten, that the nature of a house fully reveals itself. The work of an artist is usually intended to dislocate things from their usual context, so that he or she is able to, then, work with those things. Thus artists who elect abandoned spaces as creation sites, take this vocation twofold, since an abandoned space is dislocated from the function it was intended for by convention. And we can notice a fundamental difference between North American artists in the 1960’s, who acted directly upon the environment, and Brazilian artists who, nowadays, work in this direction. It is characteristic of North American culture to consider the empty space as an object of conquest and occupation. In ‘land art’, for example, the artistic operation takes place through the intervention in the environment, according to construction methods and resources that reported to the American spirit of exploration and conquest of empty spaces. In the case of Brazilians, the living-with empty or abandoned spaces happens without polarization or antagonism and with much more tolerance. What do Brazilian artists do with such places? They give voice to the emptiness, to that specific situation where time passes silently, causing slow changes that add up without any other interference beyond the very condition of abandonment. And this moment, not witnessed in the history of a place, a sort of non-reported interval, not lived in ordinary lives, is precisely the moment – out of time, to which nobody pays attention – that has been mobilizing the sensitivity of our artists. Much has been written and read about the construction of buildings, the incidents that occurred during the periods of occupation. We read and write about the date when houses and buildings fell into abandonment and celebrate the day of their eventual re-occupation. The artist, however, is capable of making perceivable – and, more than that -, of giving life to a time passed in abandonment, of revealing a peculiar permanence of things through a time spent in the absence of man. I believe that, in the case of Brazilian artists, we should speak rather about acquaintanceship with and observation of the abandonment; speak of revelation of places existing outside of time. In my view, this is much more what it is, rather than occupation itself.
(Notes from a speech by Lorenzo Mammi about the Project Arte Construtora Ilha da Casa da Pólvora. Porto Alegre, 1996).
*
3.
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” (…) Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer? When would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?
So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.
(WOOLF Virginia, To the Lighthouse. London, The Hogarth 1927.)